Lessons

Lesson 1

Course Overview, Organization and Introduction to Contemporary Class Schemas: E.O. Wright

1. Preliminary definitions: what is the social structure?
2. The class structure: What are social classes and why is it important for sociology to study them?
3. Antecedents of contemporary thought (I): Karl Marx
4. Contemporary class approaches I: Erik Olin Wright
-Theory:
/ Exploitation
/ Loyalty rents
/ Skill rents
/ Wright’s Class schema
/ Some problems

Lesson 1 slides ppsx

Lesson 1 slides pdf

Readings* 1

Readings* 2

Lesson 2

Contemporary Class Schemas II: John Goldthorpe

1. Antecedents of contemporary thought (II): Max Weber
2. Marx and Weber: Similarities and differences
3. Contemporary class approaches II: John Goldthorpe
-Theory
-The EGP Class schema
-Some problems

Lesson 3

Sorensen's employment-rent approach: Debate and application to the study of the Spanish Labour Market

Readings

Additional links: Sara de la Rica & Javier Polavieja on the Spanish Labour Market

(In Spanish)

Lesson 4

Class Mobility: An introduction to key concepts,. methods & debates

1. The empirical study of social mobility
2. Preliminary definitions: Concepts and research questions
3. The 2 “classical” hypotheses about social mobility
-The Marxist polarization hypothesis
-The liberal hypothesis
4. The mobility table
-Inflows, outflows and odd ratios
5. Discussion

Lesson 5

Comparative research on social mobility

1. Theories about variation of mobility rates across countries and over time:
-Liberal theory of industrialism—logic of industrialism
-The importance of politics
-National / cultural exceptionalism

2. Four generations of comparative mobility research: Testing mobility trends with comparative data
-The Lipset-Zetterberg hypothesis (1959)
-The Featherman-Jones-Hauser hypothesis (1975)
-The Constant Flux hypothesis: Erikson and Goldthorpe (1992)
-The latest evidence: Breen (2004)3

3. Discussion & mobiliy exercise

Lesson 6

Educational attainment & the meritocracy debate

1. Why do sociologists care about educational stratification?
-The main research questions in educational attainment research
2. Liberal and related theories of meritocracy
-Four predictions of the increasing meritocracy thesis (IMT)
3. Cross-national Trends (I): Educational expansion
-Key features of educational systems
4. Cross-national Trends (II): The effect of O on E
5. Cross-national Trends (III): Increasing meritocracy?
-The Linear Regression Model
-The Sequential Logistic Regression Model
-Findings
6. Mechanisms: Primary and secondary effects
7. Discussion

Lesson 7

Investigating primary effects: Ability & inequality

1. Types of Ability
-Cognitive and non-cognitive abilities
-Ability types, school performance, educational attainment and socioeconomic success

2. The Transmission of ability
-Genetic inheritance?
-Parental endowments, resources, investments and parenting styles
-Environmental Stress: Residential Deprivation and Peer-effects
3. The importance of early intervention
-The importance of the early years in ability development
-An illustration of investment returns: The Perry Preschool Project
4. Discussion

Primary Effects II: The role of schools
1. Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital and the reproduction of inequality
2. Do schools discriminate?: Some experimental evidence

3. Schools are actually equalizers: The summer learning loss gap

4. Discussion

Lesson 8

Investigating primary effects II: Parenting styles and health outcomes

Chan & Koo 2011*

Sullivan et al. 2013*

Excercise 1

Readings* 3